Making a home in Hebron tinderbox

HEBRON, West Bank — Bristling with Israeli flags flying from porches and windows, the newest outpost of Jewish settlers in this tinderbox city was deceptively quiet on a recent afternoon.

Women prepared lunch in the shared kitchen, a young man drilled a hole in a wall to put up fixtures, and children wandered through the bare rooms where plastic sheeting served as makeshift windowpanes.

The settlers moved into the unfinished three-story building March 19, and it already houses more than a dozen families, with jury-rigged lighting and water tanks installed.

The compound is the biggest claimed by settlers here in more than two decades and significantly expands the range of their presence in the ancient city of Hebron, where more than 600 Jews live in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods.

The settlers' move poses yet another challenge to the beleaguered government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, which was rocked last week by an official report accusing it of "serious failures" in its handling of last summer's war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. The report led to a massive demonstration in Tel Aviv and to calls from within the prime minister's own camp for him to step down.

Olmert has rejected the demands for his resignation. But analysts say he has been left too weakened to move decisively on any front, whether pursuing peace initiatives, responding to threats on Israel's borders or confronting the settlers.

Ownership dispute

The Hebron settlers say that the timing of their move has nothing to do with Olmert's current woes and that they took over their new building after purchasing it through a third party in a transaction concluded in Jordan. That title claim is disputed by the Palestinian owner, who has petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to evict the settlers.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz has ordered the settlers out on the grounds that acquisition of property by Israelis in Palestinian areas must carry his approval, according to law. Atty. Gen. Menachem Mazuz has ruled that the settlers have a right to challenge the eviction order in the Supreme Court, a process that could delay any action to remove them.

In the meantime, the settlers are preparing for what they say is a permanent stay.

"We're here forever," said Yisca Levinger, 31, a mother of five, whose father-in-law, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, started the first Jewish settlement in Hebron less than a year after the city was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War. "It's important for Jews to spread out and live everywhere in the Land of Israel."

Ruth Hizmi, a teacher and mother of seven, was putting together a bed for her first night at the new building. "The government has confined us to a small ghetto, and there's a national need to change the situation where a Jew can't buy a house in the Land of Israel," she said.

The settlers in Hebron live under heavy protection in four enclaves in an area that remains under Israeli army control, about 20 percent of the city of 160,000. The rest of Hebron is controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

The settlers' new compound is perched on a hillside overlooking the road connecting Hebron with Kiryat Arba, a neighboring settlement town, and forms a link in what the settlers hope will be a chain of Jewish enclaves running from Hebron to the settlement.

"This fits right into the puzzle," Noam Arnon, the spokesman for the settlers, said as he surveyed the area from the roof of the building.

The view took in the surrounding Arab neighborhoods and the path used by settlers from Kiryat Arba to reach the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the shrine revered by Jews and Muslims as the burial site of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives.

A settler from Kiryat Arba, Baruch Goldstein, gunned down 29 Muslims at prayer at the shrine in 1994, and in 2002 Palestinian gunmen killed 12 Israeli soldiers and security guards who had accompanied Jewish worshipers returning to the settlement from prayers at the tomb.

Arnon said that settlers in the new enclave had no intention of pushing out their Arab neighbors and were ready to live peacefully with them. "We have no problem living as neighbors with the Arab population," he said. "We didn't come to create a single-ethnic area."

Yet the presence of the settlers, who are among the most militant in the West Bank, has already led to some trouble, according to Palestinians living nearby and international observers posted in Hebron.

Fatima Jaabari, who lives across the street, said that settlers had hurled insults, stones and even urine-filled bottles at passing Palestinians, and that after a recent stone-throwing clash between Jewish and Arab youngsters, settlers charged into her house and tried to grab her daughter. A white Star of David is spray-painted on her front door.